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COMPUTER-AIDED IMPROVISATION

Emupo is a software interface developed in Max/MSP for musical improvisation. The reference of the title to a famous literary group comes, in part, from a tongue-in-cheek identification to the description that Raymond Queneau famously gave of himself, “we are rats that build our own labyrinth to escape from”. The principle particularities of this interface are:

– The continual production of sounds. This flux of sound events generated by the computer place the user in a musical attitude at the opposite extreme of that of the musician. The user finds it impossible to make a sound, they must think in terms of modeling musical material. This is carried out by controlling the acoustic and musical parameters such as timbre, pitch, and the temporal organization.

– The collective production of a unique improvised speech. Emupo is controlled by several users. However, it creates only one musical speech. Interactions (a very important concept in improvisation) among ‘Emupotists’ are therefore very different from those found in traditional improvisations. Here, the interaction is not between autonomous musical speeches, but between different parameters of a single speech and therefore of the same sounds.

– The introduction of the accident in the computer’s behavior With the possibility of lowering the predictability of the computer’s choices for the majority of the parameters, users are exposed to impromptu suggestions by the computer that could create an additional group member with whom to interact.

– The creation of a sound bank of instrumental sounds recorded by the musicians. This sound bank can be seen as Emupo’s raw material. We have decided to fill this sound bank with sounds from instruments we play elsewhere with this group. Basically, we perform in concert in the double role of Emupo users and musicians. The proximity of the timbre of the speech produced by Emupo and the instrumental speeches is essential making this second level of interaction apparent.

Extract of a concert following the workshop given at the Columbia university and many other events organized by the ImproTech Team, dedicated to the exploration of the links between musical improvisation and digitaltechnologies.